FreeIPMI provides in-band and out-of-band IPMI software based on the IPMI v1.5/2.0 specification. The IPMI specification defines a set of interfaces for platform management and is implemented by a number vendors for system management. The features of IPMI that most users will be interested in are sensor monitoring, system event monitoring, power control, and serial-over-LAN (SOL).

install libipmimonitoring-dev or libipmimonitoring-devel (freeipmi-devel on RHEL based OS) using the package manager of your system.

re-install netdata from source. The installer will detect that the required libraries are now available and will also build freeipmi.plugin.

Keep in mind IPMI requires root access, so the plugin is setuid to root.

If you just installed the required IPMI tools, please run at least once the command ipmimonitoring and verify it returns sensors information. This command initialises IPMI configuration, so that the netdata plugin will be able to work.

The plugin creates (up to) 8 charts, based on the information collected from IPMI:

number of sensors by state

number of events in SEL

Temperatures CELCIUS

Temperatures FAHRENHEIT

Voltages

Currents

Power

Fans

It also adds 2 alarms:

Sensors in non-nominal state (i.e. warning and critical)

SEL is non empty

The plugin does a speed test when it starts, to find out the duration needed by the IPMI processor to respond. Depending on the speed of your IPMI processor, charts may need several seconds to show up on the dashboard.

Specific sensor IDs can be excluded from freeipmi tools by editing /etc/freeipmi/freeipmi.conf and setting the IDs to be ignored at ipmi-sensors-exclude-record-ids. However this file is not used by libipmimonitoring (the library used by netdata’s freeipmi.plugin).

This instructs the kernel IPMI module to pause for a tick between checking IPMI. Querying IPMI will be a lot slower now (e.g. several seconds for IPMI to respond), but kipmi will not use any noticeable CPU. You can also use a higher number (this is the number of microseconds to poll IPMI for a response, before waiting for a tick).

If you need to disable IPMI for netdata, edit /etc/netdata/netdata.conf and set: